Second chapter has been rewritten! :D
xXx
(Preparation — Unclean Intrusions — Recollection — Survey — The Rite Begun — A Strangeness — The Rite Undone — Reproach of the Self)
~~~ are used for changing the perception of vision (POV)
••• denotes flashback
*** denotes time skip
… denotes silence
xXx
~~~
xXx
I feel… unwell…
She caught the thought the way one catches a hand reaching into a pocket not its own. She held it. Examined it. Crushed it beneath the heel of her attention and turned back to the business of the world.
Away! Away with thee, thou profane and creeping thought!
The skull beneath her palms was solid. It was ordinary, she was grateful for this. She counted her breath, and she let the counting be enough.
Below her station the great hollow moved, slow as breath held too long, slow as breath forgetting it was ever free. Her brothers and sisters moved through the chamber. Censers on black iron chains. The chains answered every step with a small metallic grief. The dream-incense rose thin and straight, then failed into drift. Their mouths moved without sound that could be kept. Their heads stayed bowed. Their shadows crossed and uncrossed across the stone as the censers swung.
They did not know what she knew. She supposed that was mercy. She supposed she ought not resent them for it.
She resented them.
She sat in her appointed chair and took stock of the resentment with the weary thoroughness of a woman long past surprise, long past disappointment. A woman who had ceased expecting better of herself and had learned instead to treat her failings as matters of remembrance. She named each grievance. Gave it a shelf and a label and the illusion of conclusion. The resentment remained. It merely became orderly. Order was not the same thing as peace.
All had been prepared for the Most Solemn Occasion. The Attunement.
That the Lord of Shades should not depart again into that silence between worlds. That terrible interval wherein prayer left the mouth and found no destination. Where devotion traveled outward and never returned, where the faithful died kneeling and were discovered kneeling, and the posture had lingered so long that reverence and collapse had become difficult to distinguish. She watched her people from her height and black tears slipped from her eyes.
The ichor had not ceased since the choosing. Folk might name it curse. She had named it gift. Which perhaps amounted to the same thing, the same wound seen from opposite sides. Once it had burned. Something molten poured into the hollow of the eye and left to cool according to its own design. She had learned not to speak of it. Speech altered nothing, and she had never cared for the sound of her own pain offered up for others' consideration. There was something of petition in it. She found petition distasteful. Now it did not burn. A scar did not ache forever. The nerve beneath it had gone silent, as all dead things eventually did. She reminded herself of this often, and more often than seemed necessary. She was aware of this, and she chose not to consider it further.
God forgive me.
The thought returned. She caught it before it traveled far.
No, she told it, in that inward country where no voice but hers possessed authority, Not now.
She knew where that corridor led. She had walked it before. Each passage had left something behind, each return had brought back less than it carried away. The loss had been visible to those who knew how to look, and no one knew that work better than she did. For years she had studied her own damage with the patience of an archivist among ruins. Taking measures. Writing for remembrance. Learning the shape of each collapse by heart.
This hour required sanctity.
She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, felt the cold trace of her own saliva. It was a small thing, an ordinary thing. Here. In this body. In this chair. Above these people. Below her, the congregation moved and prayed and wove her name together with the name of God, as if the two belonged beside one another.
They were not. She knew this. She did not correct them. She did not inquire too closely into the reason.
Below, a younger Seeker caught a foot on the hem of an altar cloth. The cloth shifted. An offering vessel slid sideways and scraped against the stone. A long dry sound like steel finding the length of a whetstone. The Seeker caught it before it fell. Looked up. Found no gaze fixed upon them. Lowered their eyes. The ceremony continued. The disturbance passed through the moment and vanished from it. She watched the place where the mark should have remained. The place remained unmarked.
Theirs was a wound half-cauterised. Seared but not sealed, made worse by the attempt to close it. She had looked on it for years. Her own communion gleamed. The thought brought her no pleasure. It never had. For nothing in it bent toward comfort, for nothing softened to accommodate her. That, she had learned, was how she recognized it as true. It was not invention, it was not consolation, but something external, indifferent and intact.
She struck her hands together. The sound broke cleanly in the hollow. It moved outward. It returned altered. Everything that touched the pillars of this place came back changed. She had noticed this early and stopped following it further. To investigate was to invite explanation, and explanation carried its own debts.
Is all prepared, she said, my dear brothers and sisters?
The cough came at the edges of the words. It softened the consonants, it dulled them, and she despised that softness. The despising was familiar like a groove worn into her. The body reminding her it was not instrument but condition, and she had never succeeded in making peace with that distinction.
The congregation answered as one body, Yes, O Hazel, our Speaker and Guide. All is made ready to please our Lord.
Their voices came together in that way she had never known in full. Varied throats, varied mouths, and all of them drawn into a single coherence, as if broken things, given sufficient proximity and devotion, could forget their separateness and become a note. It was beautiful. It was not safely so. It arrested the eye before thought could arrive to correct it, before interpretation could step in and name what was being seen, and she let it remain uncorrected.
She swallowed the bitterness in her throat and began.
O God Above Gods, we seek Thy mercy.
The litany unfolded as it always had. It was rehearsed, it was repeated, and each phrase set down like a stone over deep water, each one an attempt to span what could not be crossed. Prayer had never been conversation, it had always been force applied to quietude like a fist wrapped in velvet, striking the same place until something yielded or the hand broke. She had never been mistaken about which outcome was more likely. She prayed anyway. That might have been the only honest part of her.
We who once clung unto lesser truths confess now our folly—
Her throat tightened. She pushed through it.
Thine origin is unknowable. Thine power beyond imitation. By that power shall we follow Thee unto the endless age—
The voices beneath her rose in answer. They were not separate, they were not many. One pressure, one current moving through many bodies as if distinction were only a temporary condition, and in that pressure the name of each one ceased to matter. She felt it in her chest, in the hollow behind her teeth like a door she had long believed sealed finally giving way. But not with sound, but with recognition.
If Thou demand worship, we give it freely. If Thou demand sacrifice, we are Thine already. If Thou demand banquet—
A pause. It was tiny, it was brief, but beneath it something opened the way a hairline fracture opened in a dam.
—consume us whole.
The cadence was correct, and the rightness moved through her like warmth through buried stone. It was slow, it was imperfect, and it was real. The congregation answered with rising fervour and their voices thickened the air. She felt it the way she felt everything now, which was too much and in the wrong places and without the distance she had once possessed and had not noticed losing until it was already gone.
We would be made part of Thee. Thy will is absolute. O Graceful Liberator, we beg Thy acknowledgement—
Something.
Something stood at the edge of perception. It was not sound, it was not movement, and it was not anything with a name in the language she'd been given for naming things. A presence. It was foreign, It was also, and this was the part she would not revisit later, familiar. Something brushed against the threshold of this place. Another will. Another hunger. Appetite without rite. It tested the boundary the way a beast tasted fencewire with its teeth. It was not threatening, it was not precise. It was merely curious whether the wire was still there.
An intrusion, an affront. Her ignorance of its nature enraged her more than the intrusion itself, which was its own embarrassment. She was the Speaker, the Prophetess, and being surprised was not within the scope of her calling. She sat surprised, the surprise sat in her chest like a stone she had swallowed and could not pass.
Hazel.
She startled, and the great chair shuddered. The congregation stared, all those eyes landing on her at once with the specific weight of eyes that had been expecting steadiness and had found something else.
Are you well, Great Speaker?
Well.
Well? What an absurd little word, she thought.
No matter, she said, Continue.
Then the cough came. The sharpest yet. It bent her forward. Her chest burned. Her hands found the armrests. The congregation stared. She commanded again. Reluctantly, they obeyed.
The lesser presence persisted at the edges. A remnant of abandoned godhood, she decided. Something scavenging on the residue of holiness like a vermin at a feast. She was probably wrong. She inscribed this possibility with the others and did not return to it.
Foolish thing, she thought, and in the interior country she scattered it from the walls of this place with a gesture of pure contempt.
She had no such dominion. She knew this. She was the Speaker. Instrument of the Lord and not Their equal and this distinction had been made clear to her on more than one occasion with a clarity that she understood perfectly in the abstract and forgot completely whenever something pressed against her walls uninvited. She imagined it gone anyway. There was satisfaction in the imagining even without the power to actualise it. This was perhaps a flaw. She filed it with the others.
Hazel.
A second Seeker appeared at her elbow, quiet and close.
What troubles you?
Troubles, me?
As though the word were built for this. Troubles were for misplaced items and minor discourtesies.
I am adjusting, Hazel said, This new state requireth time.
The words emerged steady. The Seeker lingered, unconvinced, and departed. Hazel breathed. She noticed that the chanting had stopped entirely, and that every eye rested upon her. The whole congregation stood frozen in a silence they had not chosen but could not exit. Their uncertainty was her own neglect given faces. She knew this.
Fury rose within her. It was clean, it was fast the way blood leaps from a deep cut before pain arrives to claim it. She unclenched her hands. The anger died as suddenly and she recognised it: cowardice in the clothes of indignation. She had no patience for it.
Begin again.
She had come to the Lord with a body already damaged. This was not a complaint.
The preparing had taken years. The choosing had taken a moment. The moment had taken everything. She had not known, then, what she was losing. This was the one mercy she had been given. Ignorance as anaesthetic. She would not have had it otherwise. She told herself this. She believed it completely, believed it every day.
Below, the congregation moved again. Their resumed fervour had a frantic quality, the particular energy of those who have been uncertain and are trying to bury the uncertainty beneath volume and speed. She understood this. She had once shared it. She had since learned that what lay at the bottom of uncertainty was not worse than the uncertainty itself. She had learned this the hard way, which is the only way anything of consequence is learned by anyone, regardless of what is claimed afterward.
We who clung unto lesser truths, her words returned to her in other voices, We confess now our folly.
She had written those words. They were correct, but they were also incomplete. All correct things were incomplete. This was not failure. This was the nature of truth, which was too large for any one sentence and broke the container of every sentence it was poured into.
A woman may be chosen and wanting at the same time.
She had not written that. She carried it alone. Carried it until the weight became ordinary, until ordinary became indistinguishable from self. She no longer knew what shape remained beneath it. She did not permit herself to wonder.
The presence at the edges shifted. It was not the lesser intrusion. Something else. Something that did not press against the threshold but arrived on the other side of it as though the wall had simply failed to apply.
The censers' smoke bent sideways. No wind moved. One of the younger Seekers near the south altar stopped mid-syllable. Stood with her mouth open. Did not resume.
The air in the chamber changed. The air in the chamber changed and Hazel felt it in her sternum, in the hollow behind her back teeth, in the exact place behind her eyes where the ichor originated. She felt it the way she had felt it before. The feeling did not diminish with familiarity. It had grown. But not by changing its nature, but by becoming more fully what it already was.
The Lord.
She thought it. Felt it. Both at once. The feeling went through her cleanly. Too cleanly. Like a blade finding a seam already present and opening it the rest of the way. She resented the precision of it. Resented that it fit. Could not make herself stop.
A woman can be chosen and be wanting at the same time.
This was the contradiction at the center. She had never known what to do with it except stand inside it and continue standing.
The congregation's voices faltered. Their faces had gone past fear into something that had no adequate name in the liturgy she had written. Hazel heard the faltering without surprise. She had always been more aware of what lay behind her than most people were of what lay before them. The ichor on her cheeks burned anew. It burned old, it burned familiar, and almost welcome in its constancy.
She straightened in her chair. The air behind her throne was different the way a room is different when something has been moved in it, though nothing is visible, and the wrongness is only felt in the beastly parts of the body that have not yet learned to disbelieve themselves. She turned slowly the way a woman turns when she already knows what she will find and the knowing has not made the finding easier.
The following words came out before she meant them, came already loose in the mouth, already gone. They came soft, a softness she would have stopped if she had been there in time to stop it.
M-my Lord?